Art and Design
Dutch Design is celebrated
locally and nationally as an
answer to our economic crisis.
The Dutch Design Week, that now
encompasses a huge range of
exhibitions, activities and promotions, seeks to build on the Dutch
tradition of good design to help
the Netherlands compete again
on the world stage. Those of us
who live in Eindhoven especially
must hope that this gamble on
design will pay off.
In the atmosphere of celebration leading up to the DDW, it is
worth asking where the origins
of Dutch design innovation and
imagination lie. I would like to
suggest that the artistic experimentation with form and content
of the 1920s and 30s, led here by
such figures as Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondriaan and Gerrit
Rietveld, was a crucial stimulus
to the early design industry. In
those days, drawing distinctions
between forms of expression
was less crucial than the intention and content of the work produced. In the museum you will
come across Rietveld chairs,

a Van Doesburg dancehall and
a Mondriaan stage set as well as
photography and poster design
in the exhibition Deze sokken
niet wit (These Socks not White).
They suggest a new society in
formation and it would be wonderful if today, a similar feedback loop between art, theatre,
music, design, politics and industry could be generated – especially here in Eindhoven.
With this in mind, the Van Abbemuseum presents two artists
who are interested in a public
that wants to find the connections between things. Both Piero
Gilardi, artist, designer and
gardener in equal measure
and David Maljkovic, a poet of
encounters and a shaper of memories,
offer views of the world that
unite disciplines and people. I
hope that everyone in our city,
and beyond, who is interested in
the future of Dutch design (and
Dutch society) will take the time
to see them.
Welcome! Bienvenuti! Dobrodošli!

Piero Gilardi
Collaborative Effects
08.09.2012 – 06.01.2013
Dedicated to the artistic and
socio-political work of Piero
Gilardi, the Castello di Rivoli, Van
Abbemuseum and Nottingham
Contemporary have joined
together to present a succinct
overview of his work. A catalytic
figure in the Arte Povera movement, concentrated in Turin in
the late 60s, Gilardi’s utopian
and generous dedication to connecting neo-avantgarde artists
across Western Europe and North
America made him one of the
most influential artistic figures of
the period.
His extensive networks and new
collective and process-based
conception of exhibition making
were crucial to two of the defining international exhibitions at
that time, Op Losse Schroeven
(Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
1969) and When Attitudes Become
Form (Kunsthalle Berne and ICA
London, 1969).

Collaborative Effects offers a new
perspective on Gilardi’s work by
tracking his varied and radical
socio-political activity far beyond
the edges of the art world: his
immersion in the far left in Italy,
his involvement in the anti-psychiatry movement, his work with
youth groups of various kinds,
and the inspiration he took from
radical street theatre. His overriding concern with human relations,
and the pursuit of new collective
forms of living, (on both artistic
and social levels), reveals Gilardi
as an important precursor of
‘Relational art’ and theory of the
past two decades.

The monographic exhibition is
itself tested to the limit by this
exhibition. The only individually
authored objects in the exhibition
were made in between 1963-1969.
These are sculptures made of polyurethane faithfully reproducing
elements of the natural world and
his celebrated ‘Nature Carpets’,
which take the form of artificial
patches of landscape. These very
early pieces were designed to be
used and shared.
Shown at leading international
avant-garde galleries, their
speedy and successful commodification prompted Gilardi to abandon them (and indeed all other
object making). Interestingly this
was just as the Arte Povera movement that he was instrumental in
assembling and conceptualising
was on the rise. Although Gilardi
shared with many of the Arte
Povera artists a concern with combining nature and culture, the Poplike artificiality and fabricated
nature of these extraordinary
objects still stand in marked contrast to the simple materiality of
the work most associated with the
movement.
The other half of the exhibition
focuses on Gilardi’s creative and
political work post 1969, after
renouncing object making. It considers a wealth of documentary
material in film, print and writing.
Collaborative Effects is the first
exhibition to survey this work in
the social and political domain
beyond the art world as a radical
continuation of his artistic praxis.

Seen in this way, Gilardi followed
through on his generation’s ubiquitous desire to merge art with
life. He shows us the possibility of
turning a dialogue into a medium
and the significance of dematerializing a project into a social
process. In that sense he demonstrates that effective collaboration between artists and social
movements is possible.
Publication
On the occasion of the exhibition,
JRPRingier released a monograph
on Piero Gilardi. This publication
is the artist’s first extended monograph, offering an overview of his
practice and ideas. The publication Includes an extensive interview between Piero Gilardi and
Andrea Bellini, an essay by Diana
Franssen, and an anthology of
seminal texts on Gilardis work.

Sources in the Air
David Maljkovic
Solo Exhibition
Walking into a scenario set by
David Maljkovic, (Rijeka, Croatia,
1973) in the form of his major new
solo exhibition Sources in the
Air is to experience a subtle and
elegant operation of disruption.
The viewer is invited to go on
a speculative journey in to the
space marked for art, experiencing a myriad of visual and aural
encounters. We are encouraged
to get lost and enjoy it!

Sources in the Air will present an
overview of the artist’s practice
from the last ten years beginning at here at the Van Abbemuseum this October and then
travelling to BALTIC Centre for
Contemporary Art in Gateshead,
England and GAMeC, Galleria
d’ArteModerna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, Italy. This is no
ordinary travelling reptrospective however, as the artist will
completely restage the exhibition
each time rereading his own
body of work and designing and
intimate encouter with the viewer
in each venue .
The spectres of modernism - its
politics and aesthetics - loom
over and inform the multi-faceted
practice of David Maljkovic.
His sculpture, collage, painting,
drawing, and architectural misen-scene often deploy the 20th
century aesthetic of international
modernism, either through its
architecture, formal tropes or
modes of display.

While Sources in the Air presents
an overview of the artist’s practice (including the Scene for New
Heritage trilogy - an epic series of
films, drawing and collages that
is an important element of the
Van Abbemuseum’s collection) it
focuses on the radical new way
Maljkovic has begun to make
exhibitions.
The last two years have marked
a distinct departure in the ways
in which Maljkovic constructs,
stages or nuances the space for a
viewer. Those familiar with his film
and installation works from the
last decade will recognise certain
interests, images, works and tropes being reassembled, re-used
and re read. Yet, the technicalities, media employed and the
modus operandi have become
more elaborate. He has shifted up
a gear, theatricalising the exhibition space, directly employing
and implicating the bodily and
psychic presence of the viewer in
his scenarios.

David Maljkovic, Images with their own shadows, 2008. Courtesy Annette Gelink Gallery

For Sources in the Air the artist
will present atmospherically and
architecturally charged installations to both house and interpret
his own works, staging a series of
encounters between viewer, artwork and the classic location of
the Van Abbe’s old building.
Sources in the Air: Publication
A major new publication will
serve as the conceptual linchpin for this travelling exhibition.
Designed by Mevis & van Deursen (Amsterdam), it will include
a main essay by Anselm Franke
with contributions from Charles
Esche, Annie Fletcher (both Van
Abbemuseum), Alessandro Rabottini (GAMeC), Alessandro Vincentelli (BALTIC), and Andrea Viliani
(Fondazione Galleria Civica). The
publication is edited by Nick
Aikens (Van Abbemuseum).

The post-spectacular
economy
Justin McGuirk
The following text is the last part of a longer essay published in the Take It or Leave It /
Design Economics newspaper that was written in the context of the Van Abbemuseum
Dutch Design Week 2011 project by the same name. In his futuristic text Justin McGuirk
unfolds an economic reality wherein globalisation splintered into locally-based novoautarkies and designers formed creative guilds, preforming as artisanal craftsmen serving
their communities.
Joseph Beuys’s assertion that everyone was an artist turned out not to be true.
Instead, everyone was a designer. It was not so much an occupation as an occupational hazard of the post-spectacular economy. Almost everything that you could
buy had been reverseengineered into a computerised wire-frame model – downloadable, customisable and printable. The trading and tweaking of these digital 3D
models – Bruce Sterling called them “spimes” – became as routine as shopping at
Amazon had been to a previous generation. But retail therapy was no longer therapeutic enough. Shoppers wanted creative input, they wanted to hack their own
versions. An increasingly skilled populace came to rely on the new commons of
open source design software and hackware. Objects existed in states of endless
transformation until such point as the owner of one of these shape-shifters decided
to materialise it. Or not. Owning the physical artefact wasn’t the buzz it used to be.
Often the real reward came from sharing the object with your network and basking
in the applause of your hybridisation technique.
This virtual economy of digital objects was the culmination of the neoliberal economic reforms of the late 20th century. The deregulation and free-market delusion
that had reached a peak in the Great Crash of 2012 had begun 40 years earlier. In
1971, when President Nixon decided to decouple the value of the dollar to the
gold standard – which some see as the end of true capitalism – he effectively broke
the link between the signifier (paper money) and the signified (gold). The open
source design economy did much the same thing. The worth of a parametric-baroque vase had little to do with its material value because it didn’t exist at the point of
purchase – it only existed if the owner decided to print it out. Its value was measured in design.

The role that designers played in this economy was not just to create the wireframe templates but to coach people in how to express themselves through objects.
Essentially, the designer became a kind of teacher, helping people create artefacts
that “personified” them. In some ways this digital agora was the technical manifestation of what Guy Debord termed the “spectacle”. When Debord said that “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation,” he accurately
predicted the virtual design economy. There was one key difference, however. This
was no longer an economy of brands – except in as much as people were brands.
And people were, exemplified by the way in which they hired design consultants to
advise on their “image interfaces”, customising their social media pages for the user
experience that was pure you. Where previously the most common way of defining
your individuality was to exercise choice when consuming branded goods and
media, now the most creative members of society could actively shape it.
A few contemporary commentators rashly chose to interpret this creative economy as a new utopia. Certainly the rules of consumer exchange had changed. In
the 20th century corporations had deployed design to consolidate their power
over the consumer in a mass market. But in the second decade of the 21st century
that global market fractured into millions of personal ones. The virtual images
that consumers created were no longer feeding the annual turnovers of corporations directly, in the way that products had once done. The corporations were after
deeper code – after the systems that governed experience and exchange. Apple and
Google chose not to control the wire-frame models but the clouds within which
people traded them, within which people advertised their perfect ideas of themselves. Apple and Google – alpha and omega – owned the very digital territory, the
network of all information. Amazingly, people didn’t seem to mind. As we know, it
would take another decade – and another revolution – to come to terms with just
how insidious and pernicious that control had become.
Justin McGuirk is a design critic of the Guardian newspaper, and was formally the
editor of Icon, the international architecture and design magazine.

DOEN I Materiaalprijs
Can you make our world a better
place? And contribute to designing
a sustainable future? Each year, the
DOEN I Materiaalprijs challenges
visual artists, designers, fashion
designers and architects to develop
innovative, sustainable materials.
From the 77 submissions received
this year, an expert committee selected eighteen design ideas. The projects go on display at the Van Abbemuseum during Dutch Design Week.
An expert jury will announce the winning designs on the opening day.

The Freethinker’s Space was an exhibition space set up in July 2008 by
the Dutch liberal VVD and the far-right
PVV in their offices in The Hague as a
space for art that had been affected
by censorship. When the Van Abbemuseum invited artist Jonas Staal in 2010 to
contribute to an upcoming exhibition,
he proposed to create a retrospective
exhibition of the Freethinkers’ Space.
This project was subsequently acquired
by the Van Abbemuseum.
In the Summer of 2011, after the VVD
entered into the coalition government,
the original space was silently closed.
When Rogier Verkroost of the Eindhoven party D66 and national GroenLinks politician Jesse Klaver came to
understand that the Freethinker’s space
had been purchased by the Van Abbemuseum, they suggested it should be
reopened. The outcome of this discussion is Art, Property of Politics IV: Freethinkers’ Space Continued.

In this exhibition we will show, next to
Art, Property of Politics II: Freethinkers’
Space (2010) by artist Jonas Staal, two
new spaces curated by politicians
Jesse Klaver (GroenLinks) and Rogier
Verkroost (D66). In these two new Freethinkers’ Spaces, the politicians attempt
to show why issues concerning art,
censorship and freedom of expression
are as urgent today as they were in
2008 when the first Freethinkers’ Space
was opened. During the opening night
of the exhibition they will contribute
with a Freethinkers’ Lecture, elaborating on the curatorial set-up of their
Freethinkers’ Spaces.

These socks not white
The 1920s – the collection in context
09.06.2012 – 11.11.2012

Fotos: Tamara Trappe

In addition to the exhibition there’s a
special walking and/or bike route that
will lead you to buildings in Eindhoven
that were built in the 1920s. Come and
get the map and descriptions at the
when visiting the exhibition.

Sarah van Sonsbeeck
Informational Weather
October 2012 – March 2013
The Dutch artist Sarah van Sonsbeeck (1976) has been awarded
the first Theodora Niemeijer Prize,
a prize which aims to celebrate
young female visual artists,
introduced by the Niemeijer Fonds
Foundation and the Van Abbemuseum. For this, she received a
cheque for € 10,000 as well as the
opportunity to realise her project
Informational Weather for a period
of six months. For Informational
Weather Van Sonsbeeck will shut
off the open space in Het Oog (The
Eye) in the Van Abbemuseum and
introduce a climate system that
will reflect the political situation in
the Netherlands through different
types of weather.
About her project, Van Sonsbeeck
says: “What if the ingredients of
the current political situation in the
Netherlands were translated into
weather? For me as an artist the
political climate at the moment
feels quite unreliable. It seems to
coincide with the unpredictable
weather of the last few months.
It’s spring but it’s cold, there’s sun
and then it’s raining again, and
there’s even been hail. Traditionally
Dutch politics have been based
on a model of compromise and
this is also how you could describe
the Dutch weather. The work
Informational Weather in Het Oog
in the Van Abbemuseum translates
the changing political situation
in the Netherlands into weather
types, on the basis of a provisional
climate system. The new weather
situation that is expected can be
followed on a weekly basis with a
weather report.” The new weather
situation that is anticipated can
also be shown via the Van Abbe
twitter account or on the Van Abbe
website as a short weather report,
accompanied by a pictogram
made by the artist or a photograph of the current weather
situation in Het Oog.

New courses and lectures this Fall (Dutch spoken)
At the Van Abbemuseum you can enjoy fascinating exhibitions and art.
But there is more. People who are interested in that extra layer of information or inspiration can enroll in our courses or lectures. If you prefer
English information, there is a possibility of booking an English tour for
up to 20 persons.
Check vanabbemuseum.nl for more information.
Cursussen. Foto: Peter Cox

Giant Step
International workshop
01.11.2012 – 03.11.2012
The Giant Step project aims to
discover the place of institutions
within contemporary culture.
It involves two internationally
established institutions, Van Abbemuseum and MOSTYN I Wales,
and two that are less rigidly institutional, vessel (Italy) and Galeria
Labirynt (Poland). The goal of
the project is to establish what
roles institutions can play in the
cultural production of a specific
area that responds to the needs
of the area itself. This fourth and
final workshop will be held at the
Van Abbemuseum.

The Van Abbemuseum’s location
in Eindhoven, in the North Brabant region of the Netherlands
is the starting point of Giant Step
4: Critical Regionalism - Exploring
the Gap Between the Local and
the International. Aiming to
expose the diverse network of
cultural producers working in the
area, the conference will investigate the relationship between
the local arts community and the
international contemporary art
museum.
For more information on the workshop and the Call For Papers go to
vanabbemuseum.nl.

Eindhoven on the map
04.09.2012 – 23.09.2012
Imagine Eindhoven to be a different place in the world. What
would the city look like? A different history, a different climate,
different geography, other
residents or another culture. From
4 to 23 September you can visit
the exhibition Eindhoven on the
Map, the results of a design for another Eindhoven, initiated by the
Eindhoven Dagblad. The fictitious
maps in A0 format, designed by
a wide audience, will give you a
very different view on Eindhoven
and its surroundings.
Eindhoven on the map is organized by the Eindhovens Dagblad
in cooperation with the Municipality of Eindhoven, Eindhovens
Regional Government (SRE), the
Technical University Eindhoven,
Fontys and the Van Abbemuseum.

Free tour
Every Sunday afternoon at midday
we organise a free tour. Register
from 11 am at the Information
Desk, maximum of two people per
registration. The tour is free but you
do need to pay admission to the
museum.
Minirondleiding
De Cicerone verzorgt dagelijks
een aantal korte toelichtingen
bij de tentoonstellingen. Deze
mini-rondleidingen starten om
de volgende tijden: Dinsdag t/m
zondag: 13.30 / 15.30. Iedere
eerste donderdagavond van de
maand: 19.30
Mini tour
Every afternoon the cicerone does
a couple of mini tours for visitors.
He or she can provide additional
information with certain works of
art that you are interested in. These
explantions start at the following
times: Tuesdays to Sundays: 13.30 /
15.30. Every first Thursday of the
month: 19.30